Comment by jakelazaroff
2 days ago
The "normal administration" to which I'm referring would be almost any administration in US history other than the current one. Freedom of speech is — at least putatively — a bedrock principle of the US.
In fact, the same Secretary of State who deported this man from the US for his speech (amongst dozens of other such deportations[1]) has announced a policy meant to prevent other countries from doing the exact same thing.[2] "Free speech for me, but not for thee."
[1]: https://truthout.org/articles/rubio-brags-hes-championing-fr...
[2]: https://www.state.gov/announcement-of-a-visa-restriction-pol...
Fascists consider applying double standards that enable them to enjoy what they deny others, virtuous. Not a logical fallacy. The purpose is to dominate.
AFAIK, the speech is still free.
The denied person seems to be a foreign national and by all looks of it, an activist, taking part in university protests. It doesn't seem all that surprising that he got denied entry.
Man, if we can't agree that "freedom of speech" includes protection from legal consequences for something you say then there's really nowhere to go from here.
Well, he appears to have been a protester at Columbia University in 2024, and he is also not a citizen.
If you yourself are a citizen, I'm sure you can express your views and not be sent anywhere. You can also vote to get people in power who are more to your liking, or even attempt be one of those people yourself.
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Remember, the far left uses terms like "assault" to describe speech they don't like. Maybe this is conservatives' chance to play "manipulate the meaning of words" and spin it as "denied entry in order to prevent assault" ?
Either way, they made certain forms of speech de facto illegal and we're not going to go all "free speech" a few years after people on the right were fired or kicked out of school for expressing wrongthink.
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Has any country ever functioned like that? The idea seems absurd. Of course you should be held legally accountable for what you say. You can see trivial examples in American culture with defamation law, laws against calling for violence, laws about when and where you're allowed to protest. Agree with it or not, we don't have a right to say what we want with no consequence. The devil as always is in the details. But people need to actually agree what sort of values we should have represented as a people to write those laws, and america has never figured out how to do that without either violence or a massive river of cash to distract us from each other.
For an instance of how bad free speech can get, look no further than the role RTLM played in the genocide of the Tutsi in 1994.
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It's the same thing a lot of the people on the right were complaining about ten years ago. Most people don't seem to understand these contradictions until it affects them.
Watching this happen twice has really killed the idea that polls are a useful way to determine mandates for government policy in my mind. Most of the population probably just shouldn't be involved.
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If you can get deported for your speech, it is not free.
Constitutional rights aren't conditional on US citizenship unless explicitly stated. [0]
[0] https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
Restating:
In your mind: Why do these qualifications move US Gov behavior - from the unacceptable column into the unsurprising column?
The protesting and activism are the same. I think foreign students/citizens should refrain from doing either of these, as they are in the country for a specific reason (to study), and not to turn its government. You'll probably get away with it when you do it at a small scale, but as things get out of hand, you are unlikely to go unnoticed - as person in the topic apparently did.
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